Donald Rumsfeld and Errol Morris’ UNKNOWN KNOWN

The controversy over Errol Morris’ UNKNOWN KNOWN, which debuted the other night at the Venice Film Festival — and will no doubt be coming to a theater near you — will turn on the issue of whether Morris let Rumsfeld get away with too much, that he didn’t press him hard enough.

To an extent, this is true. Morris doesn’t confront him with things he says that are clearly untrue, with instances in which he insists he never said things that he most certainly did, and with the policies, that he championed, that led to disaster. The one glaring omission, a surprising one, is that he doesn’t talk about Rumsfeld’s theory of warfare, his insistence on a small invading force, which was fine for overthrowing the government but insufficient for maintaining (or enforcing) peace in Iraq.

However, this is a movie quite different from THE FOG OF WAR, Morris’s film length study of another defense secretary, Robert McNamara. That film was specifically about the issue and facts of the Vietnam war, as illuminated by MacNamara’s perspective, and it’s pretty safe to say that Morris was more or less in MacNamara’s corner on that one, that he (more or less) believed him and shared his point of view.

UNKNOWN KNOWN is not about the facts so much as it’s a study of one particular personality — one of the personalities behind a foreign policy calamity. Instead of agreeing or sympathizing with Rumsfeld, Morris’s challenge is to cover over his own disapproval, enough to create an environment in which Rumsfeld can feel safe enough to reveal himself. He gets Rumsfeld to perform. Apparently, Rumsfeld wrote 20,000 memos while serving as Secretary of Defense between 2001 and 2006, and Morris persuades him (you get the feeling it didn’t take much persuasion) to read many of them out loud. Rumsfeld’s voice is all over the soundtrack.

I’ll say more in the review, but one of the interesting things about the movie is that Rumsfeld is an engaging, witty personality. This is inescapable. And yet after a while the personality reveals deeper layers. So does the mind. He goes from being a likable, thinking person to seeming like a colossal narcissist, one who thinks and analyzes and questions, but in circles, and to no avail.

People walk out of the movie thinking, “Oh, that man is awful — but I’m sure everybody else will love him.” That in a way is Morris’s sneaky achievement. I doubt anyone will come away loving Rumsfeld, at least no one who watches more than a half hour of the movie.